By now the curtain had risen on the play. Mrs Chandler reached over and placed her hand on his thigh, pressing meaningfully against the hard muscle beneath his black trousers. He resisted the urge to push her away. Once upon a time he would have welcomed her attention and tried his luck with her, even though he knew that financially he wasn’t in the league of the men who kept her.
He smiled at her as if he was relishing their evening together—after the play he’d arranged for an intimate supper. But it was an act. Mrs Chandler was a practised courtesan, and beautiful and charming as she was, there was only one woman who was occupying his thoughts tonight. She rejected him in the most heartless manner and still he couldn’t forget her.
As Mrs Chandler turned back to the stage, he allowed his gaze to sweep over the dimly lit theatre, taking in the rapt faces of the occupants of the other boxes and the crowded stalls below. And that was when he saw her. There was no mistaking her perfect profile, or the mouth he had kissed over and over again.
Lavinia.
She was seated in the box directly beside him and he wondered why he hadn’t seen her immediately. Her dark hair was dressed on top of her head, with loose curls lying against one bare shoulder. Diamond earrings dangled from her ears—he recognised them from the dinners he had shared with Patrick and her in the old days. When she was still his friend’s wife and not his widow. When she was everything he had ever wanted and desired.
Inside his chest his heart was aching. Hurt, betrayal, regret . . . far too many emotions for him to begin to unravel, even if he wanted to. And he really didn’t need this complication tonight, and likely she didn’t want it either. Because he was certain that Lavinia had already seen him. Her rigid pose was a dead giveaway, as was the nervous flick of her fan.
A hot burst of anger made his mouth tighten into a hard line as he asked himself why the very sight of him should cause her to pretend he wasn’t there. At Monkstead’s, when she’d shown she wasn’t interested in rehashing the past, he had played the perfect gentleman, making polite enquiries, and then walking away from her.
And yet now here she was, pretending he didn’t exist.
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Was he being unfair? He knew their shared past made any exchange between them awkward. All the more reason to be polite strangers. Indifferent strangers. She’d treated him like that stranger at Monkstead’s, so why wasn’t she able to do so now?
It occurred to him that maybe Lavinia was not quite as unaffected as she was pretending.
The temptation was strong. To force her to acknowledge him. To make her look at him, really look at him. Would he be able to battle past the Ice Maiden and uncover the hot passionate woman he remembered? Or was that woman gone forever?
Just at that moment Lavinia turned her head and stared straight back at him.
The shock of their eyes meeting was quite profound.
As if from a distance he could hear the play continuing, and a ripple of laughter from the crowd, but all his focus was on Lavinia. A fist closed around his chest, tightening, making it difficult for him to breathe.
Because what he saw in Lavinia’s dark eyes was not ice, not cold indifference. What he saw was the past.
Five
Two years earlier
It was the same house. They were to meet at two o’clock in the afternoon and the more Lavinia thought about it the more nervous she became. She hadn’t expected to feel like this. She’d preferred to think of her meeting with Captain Longhurst as something that was a necessary evil in order to achieve her heart’s desire, and Patrick had assured her of his friend’s trustworthiness.
“Sebastian is a gentleman and he will never disclose our secret. You haven’t changed your mind, Lavinia? I need a child, an heir, but if you have changed your mind . . . ?”
She’d said she hadn’t and she wanted this too and really, she wasn’t concerned with the mechanics of it. But it was a lie. Although it was true that she wanted a child, and she wanted to please Patrick, the mechanics of achieving their wish were very much on her mind. Pretending otherwise required a great deal of icy self-control and it was as if that self-control was beginning to fray around the edges.
Lavinia felt anxious in a way she could not remember ever feeling before, as if she was anticipating their meeting for reasons other than the stated purpose. Sometimes she found herself daydreaming about the last time they met, when Sebastian had kissed her. He’d told her he would need to kiss her if he was to take her as a man takes a woman, that he would need to touch her. Before that she had not thought it would be necessary. That he could perform the act quickly and without emotion, with barely a glance, and that would be that.
Her marriage to Patrick was friendly and comfortable, but recently she could probably count on one hand the number of times he had visited her bed. His spirit had been willing but his body was unable to complete the task he set it, and after some embarrassing fumbling, he had stopped visiting her. Lavinia considered herself a virtuous wife, one willing to do her duty. Her marriage bed gave her a sense of companionship and warmth; a closeness to the man who was her husband. She missed that. But could she say she enjoyed the act itself? No, she couldn’t, and she did not expect to.
From an early age, her mother had lectured her that ladies did not delight in such things. A wife’s duty was to make children and run the household and behave in a manner appropriate to her place in Society.
There had certainly been no mention of kissing and touching!
Lavinia told herself on the way to her two o’clock appointment that she would simply have to bear it. A momentary discomfort, a brief awkwardness, and then she could go home. With luck, there would be no need for more of these uneasy assignations with Captain Longhurst. She could move on to the next phase of her life and put all of that behind her.
But when she arrived it wasn’t as she’d expected.
Captain Longhurst was waiting for her in the bed chamber, and he had opened a bottle of wine.
She was taken by surprise and without a clue what to do. Walk out? Change her mind? Tell him this was inappropriate and to recork the bottle? Automatically she began to take off her bonnet and outer clothing, setting them carefully aside while she considered her next step. When she looked at him again, he had poured her a glass and was holding it out to her.
“I don’t—” she began.